There is a happy medium. The big beautiful bill stuff is not normal. There are some states that have single issue clauses where the bill must be a single issue, resulting in more concise bills. Enforcement and rules can be made by agencies too. I think the whiplash is more of a two party thing since the bipartisan ones rarely flip-flop. The other stuff barely passes. We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.

> We would still have whiplash even if implementation were left to another congress because it would still barely pass.

Not so, not if it were left to cross-party committees. By and large even the US system seems to have functional committees when you ignore a few grandstanders.

Unfortunately the US system seemingly tends towards creating massive legislation, partly because of the absence of this secondary legislation distinction, and partly because of the really interesting difference in the way it approaches opposition. In most of the world, if your bill passes with a huge majority, it's a good sign.

From my external perspective, it appears that in the USA, a bill passing with a huge majority is often seen as a significant failure, because opposition is so much more partisan and party loyalty battles so much more brutal, and the system so nearly two-party 50:50 deadlocked at all times, that if you get what you want with a huge majority, you weren't asking for enough.

So what tends to happen is that a bill starts off with a strong majority and then gets loaded down with extra, often tangentially-related detail, until it is juuuust going to squeak through.

The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee. It also might be less vulnerable to lobbying, because the secondary legislation committees are small standing committees and handle more than one kind of secondary legislation, so lobbying influence tends to stick out a bit more.

"The primary/secondary legislation approach tends to head off that possibility because secondary legislation that is genuinely unwieldy tends not to get out of committee."

Cause and effect is off here. If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after, then having secondary legislation would also be loaded down after. Splitting into two stages isn't the fix. Fixing the two party issues would still be necessary.

> If the primary legislation we already have makes it out of committee to be loaded down after

But it wouldn't be. I mean, you can't retrofit this onto the US system now anyway, but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation.

Our system still produces bloated things like the UK tax code, but the general thrust of UK primary legislation is that it is absolutely small enough to be read fully and debated.

"but the primary/secondary split culturally leads to much, much smaller primary legislation."

Maybe if starting from zero, but not with the established culture.

Except in Australia experts don't come into it, except for sham inquirys that are held as a matter of course.

In this case, basically all the tech experts and child safety experts were saying that a blanket ban is not a workable policy, and could create harms in certain marginalised demographics where teens may rely on social media for support, yet the Government ignored them all and ploughed ahead.

The only changes to the legislation came from some political horse trading with the Opposition to get it through the Senate.

> The only changes to the legislation came from some political horse trading with the Opposition to get it through the Senate.

Well that is the normal process of things, surely? I mean, (politics is the art of the possible) * (nobody really likes seeing how the sausage is made).

Yes, but it's kind of insulting when they make a song and dance of fake 'evidence-based policy' and community consultation, with a whole inquiry and inviting experts to testify in front of legislators and tell them that the bills are flawed and unworkable, and that the policy is flawed from the beginning, and they sit there asking questions and nodding and looking concerned, and then it's just roundly ignored...

This process also got thousands of public submissions, many of which would have been in opposition, but they didn't have time to go through them all so they only published a dozen or so...

It just makes a mockery of the whole thing.